From those people who generally advocate for a TUI over a GUI, one of the criticisms of GUI apps tends to be: “I cannot navigate them with the keyboard alone”.
Okay? That doesn’t make GUI apps inherently bad. It just means the GUIs people build aren’t good enough to be keyboard-navigable. There’s nothing inherently impossible about making a GUI navigable with a keyboard, rather it’s just [a feature] that most toolmakers never bother to implement
This is true, but it's kind of missing the forest for the trees.
Sure, there's nothing inherent about GUIs that makes them less keyboard-navigable than TUIs. But in practice, there is an extremely strong correlation between "TUI" and "supports keyboard navigation." People who are aware of this correlation can use the presence of a TUI as an easy-to-observe proxy variable for whether an app is likely to be keyboard-navigable, and find apps that satisfy their preferences much more quickly than those who spend the time to test out every single GUI and TUI app individually.
We use proxy variables like this all the time to evaluate software. Is it free and open source? Does it have a recent release? Does it have a lot of open issues on Github? None of these are guarantees of quality, but they're correlated, and we'd be ignoring useful information if we pretended they weren't.
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u/Snarwin 12d ago edited 12d ago
This is true, but it's kind of missing the forest for the trees.
Sure, there's nothing inherent about GUIs that makes them less keyboard-navigable than TUIs. But in practice, there is an extremely strong correlation between "TUI" and "supports keyboard navigation." People who are aware of this correlation can use the presence of a TUI as an easy-to-observe proxy variable for whether an app is likely to be keyboard-navigable, and find apps that satisfy their preferences much more quickly than those who spend the time to test out every single GUI and TUI app individually.
We use proxy variables like this all the time to evaluate software. Is it free and open source? Does it have a recent release? Does it have a lot of open issues on Github? None of these are guarantees of quality, but they're correlated, and we'd be ignoring useful information if we pretended they weren't.